"Separate Kingdoms: Stories" by Valerie Laken

Alan CheuseSpecial to the Tribune

Is a short story collection supposed to have some cohesion, one story relatively related to another in tone and style, if not subject, revealing a focused and intense talent? Or should the stories be wildly disparate, showing off a broad talent? Most of the modern story writers whose work we love and admire tend to be those who work the first way. For Valerie Laken, a Midwesterner by birth and by choice - born in Illinois, studying in Michigan, working now in Wisconsin - the news seems to be that the fine craftsmanship and powerful insight in her first collection of her short stories suggest that she can go either way.

The title story in the collection embodies this brilliant if problematic state in which her fiction seems to reside. An experimental piece of work that gives us the account of a troubled Midwestern family in a split-screen effect - two parallel narratives about the same events running down the page divided by a dotted vertical line - visually emphasizes the malaise of the soul suffered by most of the characters in these stories, and the shift back and forth in the rest of the volume between stories that take place in Russia and stories set in the United States.

The painful awareness of his closed off life turns blind young Anton to early sorrows in the opening tale, "Before Long," one of the Russian stories. Marion, the Midwestern American golfer with the prosthetic leg in "Spectators" suffers that same sort of closing off, from her husband as well as from her peers. In the story titled "Remedies," Nick, as Laken describes him, is the regional sales rep for three restaurant franchises, and suffers from an odd neurological condition. As he tells the doctor after he suffers an automobile accident caused by his intermittent ailment, "...everything around me skips - traffic, road signs, the clouds - everything jerks ahead just a little..."

Which is something like the effect Laken herself creates for the reader when she moves from the United States to Russia in "Family Planning" and "Map of the City." In the former story two American women, committed lovers, arrive in the Russian capitol to choose a child in an adoption case. The city itself seems to reflect their ambiguous states of mind, as they find themselves relieved "that not all the buildings were like the mysterious, gray, Soviet-looking behemoths...many were beautiful old stucco buildings, painted pale yellow and burgundy and pink, with elaborate porticos in front..."